10/26/2009

The now-expected Monday sub-post.

*It's Halloween, almost, and David Welsh invited me to participate in a special edition of his Flipped! column over at the Comics Reporter. The topic is horror manga, so I (briefly) cover works by three ghosts of Japanese comics: (1) Junji Ito, the once-top banana among Kazuo Umezu devotees who's since vanished from the North American scene; (2) Ultra-Gash Inferno auteur Suehiro Maruo, soon to re-materialize in English via The Strange Tale of Panorama Island, coming next year from Last Gasp; and (3) the notorious Jun Hayami, whose Creation Books-curated ero-guro collection Beauty Labyrinth of Razors wound up as the Great Pumpkin of manga in English when UK printers deemed it too hot to handle and the publisher briefly released it as an e-book before sending it away to live with the Great Old Ones.